112 HENRY GEORGE

and the stranger began chatting with another compositor named
Boyle as the two set type. At last Boyle broke in, "You are an
American and a compositor, and from what you've been telling
me youVe been a sailor and a miner. The man who wrote this
book we're working on, was all those things. Can it be that you
-are-?"

"Yes ," admitted Henry George, "I am!"7

In August, 1882, the American set off on a jaunting-car trip
to western Ireland to study and write of conditions there. With
him went an Englishman, James Leigh Joynes, a master of Eton,
who had been engaged to write articles for The Times of
London.

They arrived at the small town of Loughree, which swarmed
with soldiers and constabulary. As the correspondents drove
down the street to the only hotel, the police seemed to leap
from the houses on each side and follow them.

A month earlier George had written from London to Amer-
ica, "It has been very hard work ever since I have been here.
Every word I write or telegraph has been watched on the other
side (Ireland) and I have been in a much more difficult place
than a mere newspaper correspondent/'8 Indeed, now in
Loughree his position became acute. Later he wrote of it to
his wife: "A lot of police were waiting for us and arrested us
(under the Crimes Act) the moment the horse stopped in front
of the hoteL Police jumped up (on the jaunting-car) and drove
us to the barracks where, in a barred room, each valise was
searched, each paper read. It was very funny to see them going
through everything like a parcel of monkeys/'9

George was particularly amused by a constable who, with
intense interest, studied a manuscript which he held upside
down. Indeed, the whole episode struck him as highly farcical.
Joynes was not amused. His companion, wrote George, was
"indecently disconcerted and frightened/'10 He went on in
this vein:

The Eton men are brave. Whatever else he may get at the old
school, a boy gets the lesson that he must not flinch drilled into
him with his Greek and Latin. But this notion of being arrested
and being paraded through the streets as a would-be assassin of
landlords, was evidently more horrible at first blush to my friend
than being fired at from behind a stone wall— the danger that his
friends had warned hym he was risking.1

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